I used to wonder: "If we have more information available to us than any previous generation and if that information is very easily accessible, why do people still not accept verifiable truths?"
I asked this question first in the context of Christian apologetics. When I originally discovered the strong historical evidence for the existence, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus, I asked myself how people in the modern age could know and reject such evidence or be capable of knowing such things and refuse to investigate them. The same question surfaced when I learned that many of the charges against the Bible--that it commands rape, sexism, racism, and cruelty, for instance--can be easily refuted and falsified with knowledge available in books or on the Internet.
Now, years after I initially plunged into philosophy and after much deeper reflection and self-education, I often wonder why people believe almost anything about things like history or science at all. That is because evidence alone does not amount to proof. Access to all the historical records and commentaries and primary sources in the world will never prove that the Revolutionary War happened, that Adolf Hitler was German, that Emperor Constantine existed, and so on. No amount of scientific experiments can ever even prove that the scientists are perceiving the external world, and thus their experiments, as they are.
When approached from this perspective--one that fully acknowledges that "unthinkable" quantities of information alone do not necessarily lead to any true knowledge about reality--it makes perfect sense that my generation, with more information amassed, available, and easily accessible than ever before, is one of the most skeptical of all time. In fact, simply having access to massive amounts of information only highlights that so many people have thoroughly disagreed with each other. These dissenters cannot all be correct, but almost all of them can be wrong. Numerous men and women have held beliefs with just as much passion and conviction as their ideological opponents clinging to contradictory ideas have. Simply having awareness of what some of these people believed cannot ever serve as a refutation of skepticism, as for some people it may seem as if the difficulty of verifying or falsifying an idea only becomes more difficult when one considers the legions of humans who have adhered to drastically differing philosophies.
Now, some people in my culture have taken skepticism to points where their beliefs are actually self-refuting. People who deny things like "Truth exists", "Words can convey truth", and "Deductive reasoning is reliable" are actually indulging in the very beliefs they claim to reject. No one can escape axioms or help but know that they are true regardless of what else is [1]. Total skepticism about all knowledge is impossible and self-refuting, but historical, aesthetic, scientific, and moral skepticism are the default positions on those respective matters until further knowledge is revealed. Just having the knowledge of different stances that people have proposed or believed about these things does not illuminate the truth, and, in fact, often greatly complicates arriving at the truth.
No, massive amounts of information and very easy access to it do not and cannot defeat most types of skepticism, despite what some Christian apologists, professors, and thinkers might claim.
[1]. See here:
A. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-self-evidence-of-logic.html
B. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/10/healthy-and-irrational-skepticism.html
C. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-error-of-presuppositions.html
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